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Overview

Allen Fremont is a physician and sociologist at RAND, with clinical academic appointments at UCLA and the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He helped establish and then lead RAND's involvement in the National Health Plan Collaborative, a novel public–private partnership that included health care plans for more than 87 million Americans. He leads RAND's Q-DART project, which focuses on the development of GIS mapping and decision tools to help health plans and providers more efficiently and effectively target quality improvement interventions. Recent work focuses on supporting regional and community-level pilots to help foster shared action and coordinated community interventions among diverse stakeholders (e.g., health plans, provider groups, public health agencies, state regulators, and nonprofit organizations). Fremont received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his M.D. from Dartmouth Medical School.

The care women receive for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes -- and their health outcomes -- lag behind those of men, even for routine care. This pilot project maps gender differences in CVD and diabetes care using data from a large health plan.

A paradigm shift involving acknowledgement of the value of clinicians in the context of community research, establishment of a stable infrastructure to support a cohort of clinicians across time and research studies, and realignment of incentives to encourage participation in clinical research is required.

Using predictive models and information about the demographic makeup of census areas, this paper generates estimates of health literacy for each geographic area and maps the results to identify 'hot spots' of low health literacy across Missouri.

The Patient Safety Improvement Corps contributed to building a national infrastructure supporting effective patient safety practices. Expanded training is needed to reach a larger fraction of the population for which this training is important.

Although the call for greater synergy between medical care and public health is hardly new, emerging technologies and the urgent need for health reform create the opportunity and imperative for them to come together.

Evaluates progress of the patient safety initiative led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), focusing on how the current experiences of AHRQ and its funded projects can be used to strengthen subsequent program activities.

The NHPC represents a model of shared learning and innovation through which health plans are tackling racial/ethnic disparities. Now that most of the plans have some data on their enrollees with diabetes and have begun targeting disparities, they want to capitalize on their collective industry strength to influence policy on issues related to disparities.

Compares the accuracy of a Bayesian approach to combining surname and geocoded information to estimate race/ethnicity to two indirect methods. The Bayesian Surname and Geocoding method is a substantial improvement over other methods.

Evaluates progress of the patient safety initiative led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), focusing on assessment of health information technology projects and dissemination of improved patient safety practices.

Evaluates progress of the patient safety initiative led by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, including updates of policy context and activities' status and a framework for assessing effects on patient outcomes and on other stakeholders.

Semistructured interviews, surveys, and direct observation were used to assess experiences, improvement activities, and costs associated with participation in a year-long modified Institute for Healthcare Improvement-style collaborative designed to improve HIV care within the Veterans Health Administration.

This research brief summarizes results showing that nearly 70 percent of doctors surveyed attributed racial or ethnic disparities in heart patient treatment to differences in insurance status or other patient factors.

The Privacy Rule is fundamentally changing the way that healthcare providers, health plans, and others use, maintain, and disclose health information and the steps that researchers must take to obtain health data.

When gender differences in social roles are controlled, being male is associated with poorer health than being female. If gender roles were more equal, women would experience better health than men, more consistent with their greater longevity.

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